Woman Crying About Father's Heart Attack Removed From Southwest Flight

[cali]

Two sisters flying to visit their father who recently suffered a heart attack were allegedly kicked off a Southwest flight after one began to cry.

Ricci Wheatley and Robin Opperman were on a Dallas-bound flight from Oakland Wednesday, when Wheatley became anxious because she is afraid of flying.

"I broke down and started to cry and I'm a little bit afraid to fly, so I said to the stewardess as she was passing, 'When you're going to be serving, I'll have a glass of wine,' Wheatley told ABC 7 San Francisco.

The flight attendant told Wheatley she'd had enough, even though Wheatley hadn't had any wine on the plane.

<snip>

http://news.travel.aol.com/2011/07/29/crying-woman-kicked-off-southwest-plane/?ncid=txtlnkustrav00000003

[PeaceNikki]

1. WHAT?!!? A story about Southwest treating their customers like shit!?

I am shocked. Shocked, I tell ya.

[Turbineguy]

2. A microcosm of a new age in problem solving.

Problem asserts itself. Answer: make it bigger.

[my2sense]

3. ?? So now customers are not allowed

to show emotion that is NOT disruptive? There has to be more to this story.

[seabeyond]

4. didnt read whole story, never on airline side BUT she hadnt had any on plane OR

she hadnt had any yet, like in airport bar?

[MineralMan]

5. Nothing about that in the very short story at the link.

She had a reason to be crying. The flight attendant was out of line on this one. Southwest paid for a hotel room and rebooked her onto a flight the next day. It's so easy to click links, and there's so much to be gained from it.

[seabeyond]

10. and a lot of times i do, and sometimes i dont want to.... hence, putting it up frontnt

[WinkyDink]

9. It's none of the attendant's beeswax.

[seabeyond]

12. it would eb if the woman was decidedly drunk... prior to

getting on plane.

the wording had me wonder

[MineralMan]

13. But she wasn't.

[frazzled]

6. This seems to have been more about her fear of flying

A number of years ago I saw a passenger across the aisle from me removed because he was audibly and visibly upset about flying. It was a college-age looking male and his mother, who boarded during a kind of bad storm and had apparently just transferred from another bumpy flight. He was terrified and creating a fair amount of ruckus. They took him off the plane, and his mother didn't seem to object (which I found odd). But it was disturbing to the other passengers ... not just in the sense of noise, but that kind of fear gets contagious. It probably wasn't a bad move.

I'm not defending Southwest--just saying that removing passengers who are not in good shape until they can calm down is not at all unprecedented. Last year on a flight to New York a businessman sitting behind me was so freaking drunk at 9 am and causing such problems to the flight attendant (and us) that I wish they'd have kicked him off before the flight started.

[seaglass]

7. This will be predictable. Many will complain about the big bad airline, then we will hear from

other passengers and their stories will not resemble this one at all. :-)

A little more detail:
http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2011/08/03/sisters-say-they-were-kicked-off-southwest-flight-for-being-too-emotional/

The sisters say it would have ended there, if they hadn’t overheard that same attendant later in the flight.

“‘Oh yeah, we’re all nervous fliers, and we all need a drink,’” Wheatley recalls the attendants saying.

“I just turned around and said, ‘Excuse me, you don’t know anything about me or my situation, so please don’t judge me.’ And that was it,” she said.

That is, until the flight stopped in Oakland, where both sisters were escorted off the plane.'

Oh and in another interview she says...

'She said, "I think you've had enough." Of course I hadn't had any on the airplane,' Ms Wheatley told local station KGO.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2020928/Sisters-kicked-Dallas-bound-plane-crying-fathers-heart-attack.html#ixzz1XfhBpXFP

[gulliver]

8. Gotta go with the flight attendant on this one.

Not enough information in the story to judge, but if there is drinking (not on plane but elsewhere), anxiety, crying, "misunderstandings," I'm fine with the lady being kicked off. For all we know she could have presented as a possible drunken anxiety attack waiting to happen.

[WinkyDink]

11. OMG, you're joking, right? Like these employees don't serve drunks up in First Class?

[jberryhill]

16. I wasn't there

But the story mentions she had a fear of flying. I was on a flight once where someone had a full blown panic attack from that and became uncontrollable. If someone is showing signs of that before takeoff, they can become a hazard once airborne.

The FA may have been wrong in this case, but they are responsible for whole planeloads of people every day, and have to make these kinds of decisions.

No, they can't be right every time.

[gulliver]

17. Just not enough information

I give both the flight attendant and the passenger equal consideration as human beings. Then I go with the one whose job it is to make the decisions. I don't see evidence to support the passenger.

The fact that she was reported crying makes it doubly important to be on "fantasy alert." Way too many people find crying rhetorically persuasive and automatically "take sides" with the person crying. It's a trope and a security flaw in the human psyche.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

18. Southwest has no first class section.

[atreides1]

14. Right

And all airline waitresses are trained to determine these psychological problems? It's not like she would have taken personally what the passenger said to her, and used her limited authority to make up a story to tell the pilot.

And the airline putting the passenger in a hotel and getting her on another flight, tells me that the waitress was in the wrong!

[Liberal_in_LA]

15. omg